… of Eli Wallach. Tuco is 94. “Hey Blondie, do you know what you are? You’re a stinking son of a….” [Theme starts.]
Wallach has 158 acting credits on IMDB.
… of Ellen Burstyn. Alice is 77. Ms. Burstyn has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, winning for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1975. She was also nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Last Picture Show.
… of Johnny Bench. The Hall of Fame catcher is 62.
… of Larry Bird. The Basketball Hall of Famer is 53.
… of T.O., Terrell Owens. He’s 36, and slightly more mature than he was at 9.
The author Willa Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, on this date in 1873. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has a great piece about Cather today and this, from 2005:
… Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky.”
She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure’s magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My Ántonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Willa Cather said, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
Source: The Writer’s Almanac (2005).